A talk given by Eugene Halliday, transcribed by, and with
arbitrary headings by John Bailey.

The drawings and tables aren’t originals, and all editor’s
notes are in square brackets.

In many instances the remarks from the audience are indistinct.

Beauty of Balanced Proportions

First of all we have to
be careful in defining beauty as consisting of balanced proportions,
because balance itself can be considered statically or dynamically.
Let’s have a look at what we mean.

The concept of balance is a pair of scales with pans weighing
the same, and weights. If the weights on both sides are equal —
this is beginning to look a bit like a frog already — if the
weights on both sides are equal, then the beam is horizontal and the
thing is equilibrated.

Now that kind of balance gives a certain security to the
observer and he feels that nothing is going to change much unless we
introduce a further force. We can call that static balance.

Now there’s
another kind of balance where we balance something diagonally.
Supposing we take the scale and tilt the beam and we put the weights
— again equal size — we have to account for this
non-horizontal beam. And this causes us to think, Why is that
scale tilted, why does the beam slope in that way? And we have to
feel somehow that there’s more weight down on one side than
there is on the other. We might represent the increase in weight by
shading this side dark, and the other side, the higher side of the
scale, light. And we then get a feeling that it’s quite
legitimate for this pan of the scale to be down because the weight on
that side is more dense.

And the appearance of
this diagonal has a very close relationship to this principle of
dynamic balance. There’s another way, we could make both
weights exactly equal and still have the beam balanced providing we
added another force to one end to tilt it a little bit, or postulated
some friction on the bearing of the beam sufficiently high in value
to stop the beam from rotating and equilibrating in two ways.

Now as soon as we get
this dynamic balance we get a totally different psychological effect.
When we look at the static balance we see that we don’t expect
any movement at all to occur so that we can begin to feel satisfied
that there is no threat. Remember, when we look at a picture we
always unconsciously identify with it. If we look at this one in
static balance — I’ll frame it for a moment, to isolate
it — this one in static balance gives us an appearance that
nothing is going to happen, everything is all right, we can afford to
identify with it and go to sleep.

Bur as soon as we look
at the other picture we become aware that because of this force
acting on the beam and holding it up, there is a feeling of
insecurity. We identify with it and then we say, what’s the
source of the force that’s tilting the beam? Can we rely on
that force to stay there?

Now let’s look at
the first diagram again and identify with it. Whenever we see in a
picture any element at all, that element stands to us as a possible
entity with which to identify. So the whole scale, the beam and the
two pans and its support can represent the body of the observer. And
therefore he has — we assume him to be facing us like an
heraldic device — his right hand here and his left hand are in
balance, so the left hand and right hand side of our being seem to be
equilibrated. Or we can say, I will identify with one side of the
balance and I will identify a friendly man with the other side of the
balance; and we are sufficiently balanced in our knowledge of each
other, our feeling for each other and our material affinities, to
maintain a static, equilibrated relation.

Now that’s a sort
of pipe dream, the ideal marriage of suburbia where nothing is going
to happen and the other aspects of being shall never enter this
sacred domain. As soon as we look at this one with the diagonals
inside, we find this element again of threat. If we identify with the
whole being — the pair of scales, the two pans — then
something is pushing up tilting the beam, and seems to come from
outside the picture. It breaks through the frame and tilts the beam
and threatens us. Where does it come from? This we do unconsciously.
And this is the cause of liking and disliking of compositions by
observers according to their own present state of equilibrium.

If I am the whole
scale, I want to know what is that force coming in and disturbing me.
If I identify with the lower pan and my friend with the upper pan, I
want to know what force has acted upon my friend to elevate him and
lower myself.

Now
beauty we’ve analysed once before so that to consider it as
balance, statically and dynamically, is not a bad approach to it. But
if we observe the French word for water in the middle of this word,
we see this eau, and we know the characteristic of water is
its absolute adaptability. If we pour water into a thin container and
water into a fat container then the water without any bother takes up
the shape of the container. The Tao Te King is based on this fact.
Water is the very symbol of plastic adaptability. It is the type of
the sage who can assume any form whatever according to the shape of
the environment. Beauty therefore means here a dynamic kind of
equilibrium, showing a substance capable of adjusting its own form to
the forms in the environment. Now let’s have a look at this in
the form of a picture.

If we take this concept
of the water as the symbol of plastic adaptable substance, and we
start to compose a picture and we put down one entity in this picture
— it doesn’t matter what it is, let’s say, I put
down a black mark here — now as soon as I’ve put that
black mark down to one side I feel over here that there is something
lacking. There’s more space here, something could be done with
it. Now, if I think of static balance I think, well I can just
measure the distance from the plane here to this vertical, measure
the same distance from here and put another one in here. As soon
as I do that I have got static balance, security appears and I can go
to sleep. [08:02]

If
I want to make another kind of balance, I will have to introduce
something other than a pair of verticals or pair of horizontals. But
apart from the vertical and horizontal, if I confine myself to
straight lines for a moment, all I’ve got are diagonals. Now
supposing I balance this one, not with another vertical the same
distance from the frame, but I balance it with a diagonal. I put a
diagonal across the place that is empty. But in my mind I have the
vertical that I might have drawn for static balance and I’ve
taken the centre of that invisible vertical, and I have placed along
it, running through that centre, a diagonal, and that diagonal is
pivoted on that invisible vertical. Now that gives me a dynamic
balance.

Quite
unconsciously the observer travels from this right hand vertical
form, over the picture to the place where one would be and it
encounters a diagonal. And this diagonal is pivoted on the point
where another vertical would be. I therefore derive from this a
certain satisfaction, and where there is the centre, something has
tilted this arm — perhaps an arrow, a force vectored has hit it
— and thus accounts for its rotation. If I was to put another
one here, exactly similar to that one, again it would account for it
so well that I would expect the whole thing to begin to spin. But
when I apply a little force on here, I am not surprised to find that
the vertical that should have been on this side, is now rotated. Now
this is again a dynamic balance.

Now the second part of
this question says, does balance displayed externally denote
balance or unbalance internally?

Now
we are talking about the human being here, although we have not
mentioned it specifically. Here is the perimeter of a human being,
and the question says, does the beauty or balance exhibited
externally — that is, where an external observer can perceive
it — indicate internally, balance or unbalance? Now, according
to the specific case under consideration, it can denote either.

Let’s draw our immanent spirit inside there, the centre
of initiative, the individuated self in its very essence, and let’s
draw straight through from there, its original equilibrium right
through to the perimeter. Now, an observer from outside can see
balance on the outside and this particular being is actually balanced
on the inside as well. So there is a case in which external balance
could have internal balance to support it.

But very often we get
another case in which the immanent spirit is unknown to the person.
External balance is presented in order to hide the fact of chaos
inside. Now this is a typical case of a neurotic or even a psychotic
entity. The balance is presented so that society will not lock up
this being. It presents a facade of equilibrium, of good behaviour
and social adjustment. But it may be presented in order to obscure
the fact of internal chaos.

Now, we find very many people of this order let loose in
society. You know that the natural tendency of a man who feels
himself in very grave danger of committing social offences, sexual
and otherwise, if he possibly can manage it he will try, and with
much industry to become a member of the watch committee ... this in
order to ally himself with the forces that would otherwise keep an
eye on him. He feels safer there ... his internal chaos makes him
present a facade of balance or respectability. So we find that either
can happen.

There can be balance
showing on the outside supported by internal balance or there can a
facade balance which has underneath it nothing but chaos. Now we can
also get another kind of thing where we have a person who is aware of
his inner spirit and is balanced on the inside and behaves
chaotically on the outside on purpose. This is similar to the fool
for Christ’s sake and it also the natural behaviour of a clown
who has factually spent many, many years learning how to equilibrate
his body. He can handle himself on a tightrope. He can juggle. He can
do all manner of things that have required many, many years of hard
discipline. So that really he is a highly equilibrated man through
years of hard work. And yet his peculiar job requires him to behave
in an utterly chaotic and foolish manner. Anybody who’s seen a
clown do a drunken act on a tight wire will realise how chaotic a
really balanced man can behave, deliberately.

So we then have the
three cases and we have to remember these when we are evaluating the
apparent balance or chaos of anybody on the outside.

[reading a question from a sheet handed to him] Now, does balance
displayed externally denote balance or unbalance internally? If it
denotes balance does it balance in an organic equilibration?

Well we’ve
already attended to that, now it says,

[reading more from the same sheet] Why do beautiful women and
handsome men get seriously ill and sometimes die quite young of
diseases which I would think would attack organisms only in a state
of dis-equlilibrium?

So let’s have a
look now. We have a body here. We will say we have a body of balanced
proportions which means proportions acceptable to the particular
nation in which this being appears. It must conform if it’s a
Nordic type to certain standards. We’ll let this external
equilibration mark represent these standards.

Now supposing he’s
therefore handsome as a youth. The automatic thing in society is that
he receives adulation. Now the more adulation he receives outside,
the more he tends to move with his consciousness onto his perimeter.
The more we flatter the beautiful child, the more extroverted and
fatuous that child will become. In fact the whole of his energies can
move onto the surface of his being to maintain his beautiful facade.
When that happens he becomes totally aware of his internal spirit, of
his initiative, and he becomes entirely dependent upon the adulation
stimuli of his environment. He therefore has no time to order his
internal self and his internal self is chaotic. [15:33]

Now there is a very
peculiar thing about the human race generally: when they admire
something because it is beautiful — when they admire another
being — they don’t simply admire that being and leave it
at that. They also require from the admired being certain behaviour.
Very, very soon the admired person finds that he or she is not
allowed to live life as they feel like living it. And either they
have to break with their admirers, or to accept the admiration and do
as they’re told.

Now frequently there is
a conflict between the internal energies and the external stimulus
requirements. We find then, that somebody who has been born beautiful
in this sense is under stimulus from outside and the stimulus is
requiring from them, in payment for the admiration given, that they
shall conform to certain patterns of behaviour. We’ve seen this
in the case of many quite famous people — film stars and others
— who, when they behave in a certain way, and conform to the
public concept of what they ought to do, then their beauty has been
duly accepted. But if at any time they do anything peculiar that the
public do not like, then they are rejected.

You may remember at one
time that clown Charlie Chaplin through various marriages and some
un-political activities, was defined as an American, as not an
American. As English, as not English. He was in disrepute
because of certain sympathies and certain activities. If he is going
to be the little man whom everybody admires, then he must behave in
that manner that they consider admirable. You may remember that
Gracie Fields became much in public disfavour by running away with a
little Italian and going to Capri at a time when public opinion in
England had decided that she ought to be very pro-British, not marry
an Italian, and certainly not go to an enemy country during the time
we were at war. She went out of favour. Now we’ll say that her
voice was her beauty in this case, and her capacity for being funny
with it.

The external stimulus
situation says, Gracie, we love you, and it says, therefore
you must do as we say. Now this is a very peculiar thing about
the lover. He tends to want you to do as he says. He has very, very
good precedence for this because he says, while in quoting Jesus
Christ, he says, if you love me, do as I say. One of the hard
sayings. Now every young man when he loves a girl wants her to do
what he says. He doesn’t say so, he wants to please her. But
she has to be pleased by him in the way that he considers pleasurable
to him to please her. And in the same way she has her own thoughts
about how she loves him. If she loves him, then there are various
things that he must do. He must change his brilliantine, wear brown
shoes and not black, and so on.

As soon as one begins
to love, because of the meaning of the word — which means the
development of the potentialities ... the egg of that being —
one tends to insist on the development of the talents, the particular
talents that one has loved the person for, that these particular
talents shall be manifested. It doesn’t matter whether the
talents are of the belly order, or the heart order, or the head
order, whatever has been the orienting cause of the relation shall be
developed further.

So that the lover
requires, as well as gives. He requires at least acceptance of the
gift on the terms offered. We there see a very, very good reason why
very beautiful women and handsome men should become ill and die
young. Simply because they have received adulation from outside, and
then they have been required to conform to the conceptual pattern of
their admirers. And this is very, very seldom in line with their
spiritual development and so there’s an internal chaos.

On other levels healthy
plants and animals all seem to look beautiful. The all would
be slightly qualified because where animals become domesticated and
the unfortunate recipients of human love, they also begin to become
unbalanced. There are neurotic dogs today who have acquired the
neuroses from their charming owners.

The point is that if we
taking anything not in contact with a human being, we have a very,
very simple law. The inner spirit of that being is pressing out and
growing, so that if we observe the way from a seed a tree grows, how
that seed, having absorbed moisture and some warmth from the sun
begins to press out, it presses out according to its own nature. And
there is no question of a neurosis for it in its natural environment.
So it just quite spontaneously goes through the stages and
progressively becomes itself. We cannot expect from the plants and
the animal — which do not have these social conflicts of the
order that human beings can produce — to show these classic
breakdowns like we find in the human social condition.

Now there’s
another related question here ... it’s question 4.

How is it that sages who have worked towards equilibration die of
a particular disease and not simply old age, while other men having
done no special work just fade away?

Like old soldiers. How
is it that sages who have worked towards equilibration die of a
particular disease?

Buddha

We’ll take
Gautama the great Buddha. He died of an internal disorder. Christ
died of a few nails, and a bit of exposure to the elements. Each one
of these men has died for a very simple reason. He is first of all a
being in an environment. And there is a fight going on between the
man and the environment.

Let’s take
Gautama as an example and examine him in the light of that wonderful
substance called modern psychological science. When he was born there
was a prophesy that he would become a leader of men, either in the
world of time or in eternity. He was either to be a temporal ruler, a
king, or a spiritual giant. Now his father didn’t want him to
be a spiritual giant, so he built for him various palaces of joy:
four main ones, one for each season of the year. And in these palaces
of joy he had all the necessary environmental entities to guarantee
the appropriate nerve situation to keep him extroverted.

So for the first years
of his life we find him actually moving round his various palaces and
the faithful charioteer who’s been detailed off to take him
round. And he is subjected to a continuous battery of stimuli. Now
this only shows that his father was not a very good psychologist.
When his father tried to extrovert his attention to stop him becoming
spiritually enlightened, he had omitted to notice one fundamental law
that Brahmin philosophy could have told him about, and that is the
law that says if you stretch a thing, it will later contract
... that every strain will be followed by a stress; that every
extroversion will be followed by a later introversion.

Now we know a law that
says constant stimulation is equal to no stimulation. So if we
take this young man and subject him to all the temptations of this
world, then his organism becomes actually saturated with these
things. You can try this yourself with any of your favourite
delights, carry on with your self-stimulation in a given field of
delight, and keep on doing it by sheer act of will, beyond the point
where you want to do it. It will then start becoming painful and
profoundly irritating. Take any act that gives you pleasure, try it
out first and see how long it takes you to get the maximum pleasure,
and then do it for another hour beyond that and see what happens.

This young fellow was
over-stimulated by all sorts of delights. And during an
over-stimulated period one night he got up and he walked through the
palace, and he there saw the dancing girls who were commissioned to
keep him extroverted. They had been working very, very hard and
they’d got rather overheated and in the classic manuscript it
says, and lo, their mascara was running down their cheeks and
their lipstick was awry. He saw them in their worst state after a
very lovely party, and quietly went away to his own quarters and
vomited. Now, after that he asked the charioteer if he’d saddle
him a horse and go away. But of course he had to be restrained even
further. He had to have told to him by continuous external stimuli a
series of funny stories to keep him extroverted.

He was not told about
birth.

He was not told about
disease.

He was not told about
old age.

And he was not told
about death.

These things had to be
kept from him, because they tend to introvert a man and make him
think about his origin. One day he went out illegitimately beyond the
confines of the pleasure dome, and he saw a man diseased, and this
gave him a terrible shock. I can imagine the kind of disease he saw,
it would be very lurid, like the kinds seen in market places, with
carbolic soap ads and so on. Now he became very upset about this, and
wanted to know what it was.

And his charioteer
said, lo, that is a diseased man and you also will
ultimately become diseased.

This upset him, so he
ran home quickly and extroverted himself to forget. Again he became
over-stimulated, woke up, saw them in the middle of the night once
more and went out. This time he saw a very old man doddering along
and he said, what is that?

And he said, That is
an old man and one day you too will become old.

So again he ran back
quickly for further stimulation and he ran out on the last time he
saw a man being taken away. It was a corpse.

And he was assured by
the charioteer, yea, verily, this man is now dead and you also
will die and that is the end of it.

Now he went home and he
had a profound depression about this, and the depression corresponds
very closely with the clinical definition of that sort of state. He’d
been over-stimulated, he had flown away from this over-stimulation,
come up against a concrete fact that drove him back to
over-stimulation, and he’d done this several times until
finally confronted with the fact of death. He was a finite being.

Now he was also born
into an environment that taught an eternal recurrence of birth and
death: an entrance of an entity into finite existence, its rotation
round that time process, the samsara, and finally his return to
whence he came, and later a re-entrance into the same field. He
immediately saw that if he wasn’t careful, if he went on
enjoying himself and delighting in this time world, he would come
back. If he came back he would grow up, and he would become diseased,
and then old and then dead, and then he would be thrown out again,
and come back again and repeat the cycle.

Logically, because he
happened to be descended from a long line of Scotsmen, he said, the
whole thing is ridiculous, I must get out. So he went back to the
root of the matter, and after a lot of thinking he became
enlightened.

Now he tried every kind
of ascetic practice. He whipped himself, starved himself and so on.
He had not attained enlightenment until he sat under the sacred Bo
tree one day, and while he was sitting there commiserating with
himself that he had not found what he had wanted, a woman came up,
mistook him for a sage and gave him a bowl of milk. And he was
immediately enlightened. He said to himself, this woman has
mistaken me for a sage because I am sitting there with my legs
crossed. She has brought me a bowl of milk. And she has a purpose in
so doing. The purpose — she wants a reward. She believes I’m
a sage, she wants my blessing, therefore she gives me the milk.
And immediately became enlightened.

He saw that he too
wanted something when he entered the time world, and because of that
he had given himself into the situation. Just like that woman who
came to him. He felt there was something clever in the time world so
he wanted something out of it — the pleasures of the time world
— so he gave himself into it like that woman and then he was
trapped and had to go round until his body wore out by repetition and
then he could escape again.

So he said quite
simply, wanting to get something out of the situation is the
cause. The word he uses for it is tanha which is
simply thirst for existence. He could be Welsh [tân =
fire], the fire of the sudden realisation of power. He thinks there
is something in it that he’s trying to get out of it. And this
is the cause of his entrance. [30:14]

Now the question is,
why does the sage who has worked towards equilibration die of a
particular disease? And the answer is, he is a three part man. He
enters into the time process derived from forces of father and mother
and traditions, and landing into the material environment that is
dragging him down all the time. And he has within his organism a
particular stress.

We’ll pretend for
a moment that the stress in this man is on the belly — like
Gautama’s father tried to put his. Now if he wishes to
equilibrate himself he must do one of two things. He must either
stress his heart and his head as much as his belly is stressed —
in other words elevate them to the same degree of activity — or
he must rob the belly to pay the heart and the head. Now there aren’t
many people that have so much energy that they can use their emotions
and their intellectual processes with as great a vigour as they can
use their lower appetite. So the general tendency of them is to try
to equilibrate by robbing the lower urges.

Now as soon as you try
to rob any part of your body, that part of the body begins to hit
back. This is how the specific disease of a person pursuing
equilibrium starts.

War in the Three Part Man

Supposing for a moment
this man is brought up in a certain tradition. He is taught that
escape from existence is a good thing and he’s taught that it
is quite senseless to be incarnate in order to become diseased, grow
old, and die, continuously. So he has a negative attitude towards the
material world. He’s got filed in his head here, the world
is no good. Now that’s a negative. That means to say that
inside here he has a special little group of brain cells and those
brain cells have connections with food and sex because they are the
two chief appetites that keep us in the material world. And it is
saying, you are no good down there. You keep me in being. So I
must cut off here the nerve lines to the appetite centres.

Now as soon as we cut
off any nerve lines and stop feeding given centres, the centres do
not cease to exist. Every organ in the body has a special function.
And when it is functioning adequately it feels happy and the cells in
that part feel happy. But if you try to stop the function of any
given part of the body by an intellectual command — which in
any case has little to do with their function — you have
declared war with one part on the other part. You have now to devise
a method of starving those impulses below of necessary energy.

You may remember that
when all the senses and appetites were arguing about which was most
important, the belly went on strike and refused to eat, and then they
all got very, very weak and he thereby established his kingship over
them all. In other words, as soon as this man begins to control his
appetite, his appetite replies by cutting off the feedback system to
the brain to have a look at the world. And it then becomes
introverted and moves towards morbidity.

Now because this
concept he has of
the-material-world-is-wrong-and-binds-one-in-existence then he is at
war with two appetites that guarantee his recurrence — the
eating of food and reproduction. He’s declared war on these
two, and therefore he cuts off the nerve lines to those centres but
nevertheless the blood inside here is still circulating and this body
has a very peculiar method of replying to interferences from the
nervous system and the brain.

There
are certain glands in the body that can make chemicals which actually
inhibit reason. For instance sexual chemicals down here when they are
at their maximum function simply flood the blood and the reason is
turned off for the period of sexual activity. If it were not so there
would be very little procreation, because procreation is highly
irrational, very expensive and a load of responsibility which no
individual really wants.

So down here there’s
a chemical reply to the nervous impulse. The nervous impulse is cut
off at the top and tries to starve it. It replies by taking the food
that it has got and converting it into sexual chemistry which is then
fed into the blood, goes back and overthrows the reason. Now the
battle then continues and the specific locus of the disease depends
upon the governing concept that the given sage has when he’s
tried to attain freedom. If he believed that the belly was his enemy,
he’s going to have trouble in the belly ... because if he’s
got any strength of will, he is going to fight the belly to the very
end. And because the belly is the source of the food whereby he
continues to live in order to think, if he wins the battle, the belly
will lose. If the belly wins he will stop trying to be a sage. If he
succeeds in being a sage, the belly is going to be depressed. Now in
the case of Gotama, that’s what happened.

Supposing
we take another man, whose stress is emotional relationships, and
says they are the enemy. The belly is all right, but you shouldn’t
be fond of the girl. The belly’s all right, but you shouldn’t
like a lamb chop or whatever it is. If he says the emotions are the
trouble, he starts the fight here. I must not have an emotional
relationship. It is binding. I mustn’t be fond of anybody, it
ties me up, and so on. This replies here, again, by modifying the
constituents of the blood, and it sends back a message to the
intellectual department, and again it floods the body, this time not
with the chemistry of sexual life, but with special chemistry and
field changes emanating from the emotions. Again if the emotions win
he stops trying to be a sage ... he just gives it up. But if he does
win, he’s going to have heart and lung trouble. [37:45]

On the other hand if he
stresses the reason, and says, the reason is my enemy, like
some philosophers have said — though why they should be
philosophers, we don’t know — reason is the enemy. They
try to stop reason. When they do that they get brain trouble.

Now, if you remember
the divisions of the head ... if we take the skull, slice the top off
it, we see the fore brain, the visual nerves and so on: forebrain,
the middle part and the hind part. It’s similar to the head,
the two lungs and the belly inside. We can see that whatever
conclusion we come to within the field of our thought, we are going
to act on certain cells in the body and they are going to send
messages into the corresponding parts of the body, and a war is going
to be declared. So if we are given the basic mythology, tradition and
thought processes of anybody pursuing freedom, we can dictate
beforehand: we can predict the kind of diseases that we would
probably die from ... simply because of that which has been
traditionally defined as his enemy in the pursuit of freedom.

[Question from Khen Ratcliffe] What happens when this happens in
somebody not attempting sagehood?

A good time was had by
all.

[Khen] Anything might happen.

Unpredictable. Gets run
over by a bus in a drunken stupor. There must be a price.

Genesis

Another related one is
question five.

[Reading again from the question list] Can a soul grab a body
which is balanced by ancestral labours and destroy it through its own
unbalance?

In
relation to this question:

[reading another] are the soul and material body two separate
developing forces coincident for a particular period of time?

Let’s have a
look. Here is the earth, and on this earth we see certain forces
arriving from outside. And these forces acting with the earth bring
up the vegetable world and the animal world, and the man world.
Specifically, we are concerned with the man world here. [40:23]

If there were no forces
from outside coming into the earth — to act upon the earth and
draw out from the earth the potentialities — the earth could
not grow, could not develop itself. A particular piece of relatively
inorganic matter like the moon shows how difficult it is for a planet
that is fairly small and with insufficient atmosphere to develop a
life of its own. For a planet to be of a certain size and to have an
attendant atmosphere and right humidity, right distance from the sun
and so on, all these things help to produce its life. Now soul we’ve
said before is spirit coming and turning round. The soul is spirit
[S] zoned off [O], a power [U] tied together [L]. So it is a solo
power of spirit and it is made into a soul by the fact of rotation.
Forces from outside come into the earth and organise the earth’s
matter into the plant world, the animal world and the man world.

Now can a soul grab a
body which is balanced by ancestral labours and destroy it by its own
unbalance? This rotates on the meaning of the word own,
it’s own unbalance. Some of these little words
are quite tricky.

There is an original
human egg. This human egg behaved in a very peculiar way, and split
itself into Adam and Eve. These again fuse and then split and produce
children, and they keep fusing and splitting and producing children
all the way. Now you can see that any child now existent is the same
protoplasm as the first man. The first man has become many men
through cell division, fusion, cell division, fusion, cell division.
So any man down here is already a piece of protoplasm which has been
through many experiences back to the original man. So there is a line
from the original man — the Adam of the Old Testament —
to any particular man. So that when you are talking about the soul
you are talking about the spirit, which is the intelligence itself in
so far as it is finited.

When it comes on to the
material level of the world, it ingests earth matter in the form of
food, and this food is chemically of a certain type that tends to
stimulate certain kinds of activity. You know that if you plant
various types of vegetable substance in the earth at different levels
in different climates in different soils, that the chemical content
of the growing plants will depend upon the available chemistry in the
soil, the amount of sun, the amount of rain, and so on. So that when
you are eating food you are eating chemical determinants. [43:53]

Now, the earth itself
is a precipitation of cosmic forces which themselves are highly
characterised before the earth condensed into its material form. So
the earth is actually a condensed zone of spiritual character. That
means that when you eat food you are not only eating matter, you are
actually getting form ... energy forms. These energy forms then rise
into you in the process of digestion and you then are confronted with
the problem of how to deal with these new characters derived from
your food. So there’s a kind of dialogue going on between the
original protoplasm which is trying to control the earth by ingesting
it, and the condensed character in the earth trying to go its own
way. So we can see that the soul, when it gets a gross material body
— that is, has taken food into itself — is the original
protoplasm divided off from the original man cell, plus the ingested
chemicals of all its ancestral food, which have biased it to
assimilate certain chemicals1.

If you change your diet
violently and suddenly, you throw your body into a period of
dis-equilibration. If you do it gradually and intelligently, you can
change your diet without a great deal of upset. But if you do it too
violently over too wide a dietetic range, you can upset yourself. If
you misinterpret the upsetment, you can begin to become neurotic. If
you recognise it as a matter of forces from above and forces from
below requiring equilibration, and you know that it takes time to
equilibrate, you are not bothered, you just accept the temporary
dis-equilibrium and go on with it.

We then say that there
are two forces at work, the condensed force of the earth’s
matter itself, and the force resident in the protoplasm of the human
race; that these two are having a peculiar dialogue. We can then see
the meaning of the statement and command in Genesis from God, spirit,
which says to man, you must reproduce, multiply, fill the earth
and subdue it. Knead it under your dominion. You can only do this
by assimilating it — which is the eating process.

Now you can see
immediately here that there is something totally different from the
Buddhistic teaching of Gautama. He says, get out, it’s a
senseless round. But there’s a very peculiar book, namely
the Old Testament, that is the only religious book in the world that
gives a specific command to the human race to fill the earth and to
have dominion over all its life forms. This is a command that man
shall develop according to divine Fiat, shall fill the earth,
shall subdue it, shall have dominion over it. And it is the only
religion that says so. And because it says, fill the earth,
which takes generations and generations and generations, and have
dominion over the earth, therefore there are two dominant ideas
springing from this command.

One of them is fill
the earth, and that takes time. So the historical sense of
Judaism comes up.

The other one is have
dominion over the earth so the hierarchical sense comes out.

So in that particular
religion we have a pyramid concept, where authority stems from the
prime egg — absolutely, the Logos — and this authority is
stepped down by multiplication, subdivisions, until the prolific has
established itself on the earth, assimilated the earth, and changed
the earth in the act of assimilation, and finally got dominion over
the earth ... which means over your own physical body and over all
physical bodies external to you. So out of this command only we have
by implication a historical and a hierarchical concept.

It is this peculiar
hierarchical historical concept that finally culminates in the
appearance of Jesus who says strangely enough, I am the man that
all this stuff was about. Now no other religious teacher ever
claimed that. It says, either the man is mad or he is what he says
he is2.

He says, what
Abraham saw, I am. If he had lived to see my day he would have
rejoiced.3
Because there is a definite purpose in this continuous splitting out
of the life force in the protoplasm over the earth, the assimilation
of the earth by the protoplasm, and thus the changing and subduing of
that earth within dominion of this intelligence, and its final
culmination in an individual who is reflexively self-conscious and a
centre of two things — a historical awareness of the necessity
for development of the self, and the hierarchical sense that
authority is always from a centre spreading outwards.

But dominion always
starts from centres. Every individual human being is such a centre.
To order a sonnet, to order a sonata, to order a painting, one starts
with oneself, and if one looks inside oneself and conjures from one’s
own depths, one can produce creatively that which has not appeared in
the time process before. Whereas if one copies from outside —
that is, is subjected to an external stimulus, is merely extroverted
and using the eye and the hand co-ordinated copies the external shape
— that is entirely the reduction of man to a reflexive thing
like a mirror, and the man who can copy accurately with the hand and
the eye and stops at that part should retire from the scene and leave
a camera where he used to sit.

Spirit / Soul / Matter

Creativity requires the
progressive self-realisation of the fact that the Absolute Spirit,
represented by the paper, is vibrating and in its vibrations is
organising for itself centres of authority. And the authority goes
outwards and subjects all the environment round about ... as far as
it can reach. And there are other centres doing the same thing. And
each centre is exactly as valid as he has power and authority and
intelligence and compassion to make himself.

So we see that there is
in fact a sort of dialogue or conflict between the material part of
our being and the spiritual part of our being, where the protoplasm
represents a very peculiar thing. It is a material substance which is
so refined chemically that it can respond to the movements of spirit.
If we dry out the protoplasm, dehydrate it, it can no longer respond,
and we have reduced it back to the earth level.

If we let it have this
water and the chemicals are properly balanced and sufficiently
refined, it can respond to the movement of spirit. And this it does
because spirit is a very, very high frequency power, and the earth is
a very low frequency power. And the earth split into little bits,
very, very tiny and put in a fluid can begin to vibrate consonantly
with the movements of spirit. So the protoplasm represents a halfway
house between spirit, life, and matter, death. And the dialogue goes
on between them in the zone of the protoplasm.

It’s worth
mentioning at this point that Christianity derived from this historic
hierarchical Judaism is the only religion in the world that actually
says that the individual is to be preserved as an individual and in
full character4.
The great oriental religions allow the absorption of the individual
by the abandonment of desire into the Absolute. But they do not allow
the retention of his characteristics.

Some philosophers think this peculiarly occidental and say it
is the cause of occidental neurosis: that the western mind
over-values the individuated self-existent being, and that the only
way to peace is by non-existence, to cease to be oneself as an
individual, to lapse back into the Absolute.

The reply of Christ to
this is that if there are a pair of opposites, you should be able to
assert both ... and therefore the divine and the human can be brought
together. There is the earth, gross matter, there is free energy
undrawn, there is soul. Free energy comes in, makes the soul, keeps
it in a fluid state and ingests the matter of the earth into it and
then the man stands between the Absolute Spirit and the inert matter
and maintains an eternal balance between the two. And this
establishes a higher philosophical justification of Christianity than
of any other religion, because it actually presents us with the form
of a possibility of a multiplication of the virtues of the infinite.
Because if we scrub out all differentiating factors whatever, we have
only an Absolute non-difference, and therefore non-value. But if we
evolve a being which, whilst embodying itself with inert matter at
the same time remains responsive to Absolute intelligence, he can
continue eternally, unbreakably, irrefragably, immortally,
maintaining the balance between Absolute Spirit and the inertia of
matter. And thus he constitutes a peculiar trinity in himself. A
trinity of Absolute Power infinite, and finited inertic existence,
resolved in a reflexive self-conscious, sensitive being which by
multiplying itself through the protoplasmic divisions has made
possible for itself a relation of individual to individual, person to
person, and therefore added something to the abstract Absolute, and
concreted the possibilities of that absolute within human relations.

Now
today, in answer to communistic atheism, there’s a growing
interest in certain matters theological and even great theologians
are now prepared to admit and to state what they have always believed
but previously kept fairly closely to themselves, and that is that
God can glorify man.

Glorify
technically means simply to make a thing stand for what it is. A man
is the great mediator between the inert matter and the unembodied
spirit. And so they are now saying that man can embody two
contradictory things: the absolute dynamism of spirit and the total
inertia of matter. And that it can resolve the opposition of these
two within himself and that he is the only being — this is a
theological statement — the only being in the universe who can
possibly do this. No other being can do it. The plant can’t do
it, the animal can’t do it. The angels cannot do it. Let’s
see why.

Man and the Angels

Man was created a
little lower than the angels and yet is destined to be higher than
the angels. And some Rabbinical traditions say, no wonder the
angels will be jealous.

Now an angel, as we’ve
done before, is a great sphere of the Logos. There’s the
immanent spirit of the Logos itself, and the efflux from that Logic
centre going out, cuts this sphere into various angles. And the zone
enclosed by any one of these beings or angles is — from the
psychological angle, because spirit is sentient power — an
angel. And every angel is conditioned by its form, and wills its own
form. So if we like to cut this down into any given size of angle, we
can see that we have as many angel types as we have different angles.
The bishop who made the joke about the angles, angels not angles,
really knew what he was talking about. He was making a pun on the
angels being angles ... as well as the Anglo-Saxon people being the
representatives of the angels on earth. [58:47]

Now angels are
conditioned by this wilful subordination of themselves to form. That
is, angels can appear in man as universal concepts. But just as the
concept of a circle is not that of a triangle, so there are orders of
angels triangular, orders of angels square, orders of angels
circular, and so on. And each order of angels is willing to be itself
and is vibrating in that manner continuously, and is not going
to do other than what it is doing.

But after this Logos
process and the subdivision into it by vibrations, and the production
of the angelic world within the cosmic Logos, there occurred by one
third one third of these angel, because of the possibilities
presented to them, and because they were conceived in the fiery
energy zone of the whole sphere, because the sphere itself is
polarised — and we will say in this particular diagram that the
north of the sphere represents the intellectives, and the south of it
represents the self-indulgences and the middle zone represents the
either/ors who’ve not quite made up their minds and are
alternating — one third of these angels compacted themselves
and produced the material world, which means that one third of the
Logic sphere energies were predisposed by their position in this
sphere when created to compact themselves, just as some others were
to expand themselves. When they compacted themselves, that compaction
was the generation of the gross material world.

Now as soon as the
gross material world was made, it became a system of mass inertia. It
was like a stone in the cosmic body ... the original gall-stone. You
know gall has to do with anger. And this is the zone in which the
anger potential in the Logic sphere was finited and localised in
order to release the rest of the Logic sphere for less energetic
activities. So we have a packed anger zone, and here at the top a
very cool calm zone of rationalising, Bertram Russell angels. And in
between the two we have some that are vacillating and have not quite
made up their mind whether they will be nice kind rationalisers, or
angry naughty boys. But as soon as this zone of the anger has
condensed and the world has appeared, it stands in the lower half of
the Logic sphere as a hard centre, and there is a break of continuity
between it and the surrounding cosmic substance.

Now this means that it
will become completely isolated functionally unless something is done
about it. So as soon as the condensation has occurred and the matter
is precipitated, then forces from outside begin to vibrate more
intensely — this is the setting up of the sun and the moon and
the stars in Genesis — and then they invade the earth and they
begin to reclaim from the earth all those functions which are not
based on pure anger, but which were drawn in by the first compacting
energies ... just because they happened to be standing around and
idly watching. Just like those fellows in the street standing round
the hole that the men are digging and don’t notice that the men
are digging under their feet until they fall in.

In tradition of the
angelic fall, the leaders of this precipitation of the material world
were so very strong in their will that they fascinated a lot of other
people who were standing about and they drew down with them
altogether one third of the angelic host. But not all of them saw the
implications. They were dragged into it. They didn’t want to go
into it, they were just watching. Now all those who did not will
to go into it and just happened to be standing around idly and would
like to get out of it, are called in the New Testament, sheep. And
the cosmic radiations coming in have come in to rescue the sheep.
[01:03:30]

Goats and Sheep

Inside man, from his
food, we find two kinds of impulses which we call sheep and goats5.

There is the impulse to
belong to the cosmic Logos, the impulse to belong to the human race,
to the earth, to the solar system, to the sidereal system ... in
other words the impulse to belong to something bigger than oneself.
And all these impulses are called sheep. And it is those sheep that
Christ has come to call. He says, come out all ye gentle folk,
who were busy watching only, and fell in by mistake.

And the others inside
that are still determined to have a go at individual incandescence
are called, go-ats. Go-atic wisdom is very, very ancient. It says, I
do not want to be called out prematurely I want to come out when I’m
ready, and not before. When Christ says, there are sheep of
other flock6’,
he is talking about some kind of ideas that are not merely the ones
that want to belong to this Absolute Father, but who want to belong
to particular conceptual groups. There are some beings inside the
earth, yet to come out, and they don’t want to come out except
under their own terms. And if you try to provoke them out with
propaganda or with kindness or whatever it is, when you try to
provoke them they begin to become very, very angry.

Anger

Now anger in a human
being is always the evidence of the compaction of egotism. We are not
talking now about morality, we are talking about fact. If you become
angry it is because your centre of self-will has been crossed. And
the tradition says the devil — that is, the precipitated
Luciferan material world — can reach you only as far as the
anger. If you can control anger then you can get out of the material
world. You can transcend the determinations of the external physical
stimulus. But if you can’t control your anger or don’t
want to, it’s because you’re identified still with those
centrally pressing forces that come under the sign of Saturn.

You can claim to be a
Satanic being insofar as you persist in being yourself in spite of
the damage done to you by your own egotism. If you are prepared to
pay the price of your profound egotism and all the suffering,
rationally, emotionally, urgefully and physically, and you still
don’t care, then you belong to the most lowly order of Satanic
peoples.

But if you don’t
want to do that, all you have to do is stop being angry.

It’s very easy to
say and very hard to do, because man stands in between two worlds.
Between the material world which is a precipitation of force and
which is the centre of anger, but in which some sheep have got mixed
up through watching, and the free spirit of the Father Absolute, and
the angelic messages coming from all over Cosmos and invading the
earth as formed forces which breed ideologies on earth.

Now you can see a given
angel has willed a certain kind of activity within the sphere of the
Logos. But a human being has not willed any particular form and can
will simultaneously any number of forms. He can do it so well that he
becomes a schizophrene. Or he can do it positively by an act of
conscious integration.

A human being
therefore, although he is born lower than the angels —
posterior in time to the angels — has the power of
contemplating the different orders of angels which are conceptual
groups of ideas, and of deciding which order of angels he will obey
for any given time. And because of this, his destiny is to comprehend
the whole significance of the Logos sphere whilst any particular
hierarchy of angels is committed by its own will to understand only a
part of it. Therefore the human being, when he reaches his ultimate
term, is higher than the angels because he’s going to
comprehend all that all the angels comprehend whilst each hierarchy
of angels is only going to comprehend itself and not the others.